Irish Lingo & Million Dollar Baby

[Beverly Flanigan]

Is the Op Ed piece from the NY Times?  No matter, but I didn't get the
impression in the film that Eastwood's character was "translating" the
Yeats poem; he was simply reciting the original English version, since I
remember it well.  Was the book he was holding in that scene the same
Gaelic textbook (or dictionary?) he studied from earlier in the film?  I
didn't look closely, but I assumed he was now simply reading from a
collection of Yeats' poetry.  But he made one big mistake:  He said "And a
small cabin built there"--changing the original infinitive of "[I will] a
small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made" to the past
participle.  Either a slip on Clint's part, or else he thought the book he
read from had a misprint.

In any case, I suspect the Op Ed editor will get a slew (slough?) of letters.

Beverly O'Flanigan (just joshing, as we approach St. Paddy's Day)


At 04:32 PM 2/27/2005 -0500, you wrote:
>Hey Y'all
>
>Irish lingo has been nominated for an Oscar in Million Dollar Baby along
>with the phrase mo chuisle (macushla).
>
>best,
>karen ellis
>
>
>February 26, 2005
>OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
>Fighting Words
>By WES DAVIS
>
>BEFORE the bell has sounded at the start of her first title fight in Clint
>Eastwood's Oscar-nominated film "Million Dollar Baby," the scrappy,
>big-hearted boxer Maggie Fitzgerald, played by Hilary Swank, finds herself
>cheered into the ring by shouts of "Mo Cuishle," the Irish Gaelic moniker
>she's been given by her manager, Frankie Dunn, played by Mr. Eastwood.
>
>The name is a shortened form of the phrase "A chuisle mo chroí," "O, pulse
>of my heart," or as Frankie will put it more concisely, "My darling." But
>Ms. Swank's character doesn't know that yet and neither do we. All we know
>is that the words emblazoned - and some argue misspelled - on the back of
>her robe are important to a lot of people.
>
>Apparently they still are. After seeing the movie, I overheard whispered
>conversations about "Mo Cuishle." A few of the movie goers confessed that
>they hadn't even known there was an Irish language apart from English, but
>they were captivated by the sound of it. In the last few weeks some queries
>about the phrase have arisen on the Internet, and students of the language
>are coming out of the woodwork. Around Valentine's Day, in particular, many
>Web surfers were frantic to learn how to address their darlings in Irish.
>
>That sort of popular reaction makes sense. In the shorthand of the film, the
>Irish, scattered by hardship in their home country but strangely united by
>the trials that threw them apart, stand for a culture of underdogs, and the
>language that was once the common idiom in Ireland becomes the watchword of
>the movie's romantic idea of the hero.
>
>As Maggie's boxing career builds to its climax, Mr. Eastwood hinges the
>movie's emotional peaks on the longing held in the Irish language. The most
>moving of these moments occurs when Mr. Eastwood's character finally reveals
>the meaning of "Mo Cuishle," and when he translates W. B. Yeats's "Lake Isle
>of Innisfree" from the little Irish-language book he carries like a talisman
>throughout the movie.
>
>An achingly beautiful poem, "Lake Isle" expresses a yearning for escape that
>fits perfectly with the movie's hope that it may be possible to build a new
>life. For Yeats, the fantasy retreat is a rustic cabin in a "bee-loud
>glade." In the movie, it's the "little place in the cedars, somewhere
>between nowhere and goodbye," imagined by the character played by Morgan
>Freeman.
>
>Yeats's poem also reflects on the more rugged emotional landscape the film
>exposes. In "Lake Isle," as in "Million Dollar Baby," the dream of escape
>finally slams against the hard facts of real life. The dream can survive, as
>Yeats puts it, only "in the deep heart's core." In the movie, the dream is
>mined by Mr. Eastwood's character when he labors to translate the poem from
>the Gaelic for Maggie. It feels as if he's extracting a gift of hope for her
>out of the bedrock of Ireland's nearly forgotten language.
>
>There's just one hitch: Yeats didn't write his poems in Irish. He didn't
>even know the language well enough to read it.
>
>On the whole, Yeats was less than rigorous in the way he represented his own
>linguistic abilities. He was never fluent in French, for example, but he
>talked breezily about the latest French book once his friends had read it to
>him. Having once made a stab at memorizing the Hebrew alphabet, he would
>later lament having forgotten his Hebrew. But about Irish he was completely
>clear. He tried to learn it, and he failed.
>
>The language issue was a vexed one for Yeats. Like many of his countrymen,
>he was at times drawn to the image of Ireland as a nation speaking its own
>language. He actively promoted dramatic performances in Irish.
>
>But he knew that much of Ireland's literary life, and even more of its
>practical business, had been carried on in English for over a century. When
>Yeats was serving in the Senate of the newly independent Irish Free State in
>1923, he spoke against a proposal that the prayer at the start of every
>session be delivered in Irish as well as English. He protested that the
>Irish prayer was "a childish performance," since, like him, most of the
>senators didn't know the language and were unlikely to learn it.
>
>Later, when the Senate was considering a proposal to add Irish to the
>country's traffic signs and railway notices, he argued against it on similar
>grounds, fearing that forcing the language on people at a moment when they
>just wanted information would hurt the efforts of groups like the Gaelic
>League to preserve Irish and spread its use. In the same session, though, he
>called for government support of scholarship on Irish language and literature.
>
>Strange as the idea would have seemed to him, Yeats almost certainly would
>have supported the translation of his own poems into Irish. Such
>translations do now exist, so it's not impossible to imagine Mr. Eastwood's
>character wrestling an Irish translation back into the original English.
>
>But all of this is ultimately less important to the film than the effect
>"Million Dollar Baby" achieves with its use of Irish. From a cinematic point
>of view, Mr. Eastwood couldn't have done better than to adopt the endangered
>language of a culture whose history has been as dramatic as that of his
>characters. And the wonderful twist of the film's pretense of translating
>"The Lake Isle of Innisfree" from the Irish is that it seems to have done
>just what the Gaelic League and all those Senate proposals, and even the
>contrary Yeats, ultimately wanted. It has stirred up interest in the
>language itself.
>
>Wes Davis, an assistant professor of English at Yale, is editing "The Yale
>Anthology of Contemporary Irish Poetry."
>
>
>
>
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